The writing in Anne
Sexton’s few journals reveals the
eternal nay-saying of the internal critic. “I am too
dramatic,” she lamented, wishing instead to take “words in hand and
speak out in unprecedented honesty.” If Sexton was going to venture
into contemplative journal writing, she wanted to strike deep and
draw blood. No messing around, she insisted. In the first entry in
her notebooks (May 25, 1960), Sexton declared “Rule one” for
writing in the journal. “I must not imitate,” she wrote. “For once,
Anne, do not lie. Dare to be yourself.” In her next entry, made a
year later, Sexton laid down the same kind of law anew: “That must
be my first rule, to dare to be trite with myself.” Sexton saw
herself as trying too hard to be like Stendhal, Rilke, and other
writers and thinkers whom she respected; posing was a weakness, she
felt, even when she was only doing it for herself. She wanted to be
Anne the poet, but she found it difficult to tolerate the
floundering and false steps that were part of the process of
becoming that Anne.

That Sexton suffered from insecurity and doubt about the
originality of her work is no wonder: when she began to write
poetry, she was twenty-seven and recovering from a mental
breakdown. She had no education beyond finishing school and, aside
from a short modeling stint, had never worked. Even as she
progressed in her literary career, Sexton continued to rely heavily
on tranquilizers, alcohol, and frequent love affairs to temper the
pain of life as she experienced it. She was in constant search of
closeness and security in her relationships, yet she harbored
terrible fears of public interactions: “Somebody sees me, and
I see myself through them. Then it’s all gone, the
whole world falls apart.”

The powerful voice of her poems led many readers to envision a
flamboyant, self-possessed (if suffering) woman. In some
situations—readings, parties, and writing workshops, for
example—Sexton played this role beautifully. Peter Davison, an
editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a poet himself,
described Sexton as he saw her at a party. She had “a combination
of awkwardness and grace, long legs and long arms, and smoke,
smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke—always smoking. Intense blue eyes with
big pupils; blue-black hair; slightly crooked nose.” Like many
others meeting Sexton for the first time, he also noted that she
carried herself like a model. Throughout her life, articles and
interviews described Sexton as a slender beauty, but by 1967 she
was carrying an extra thirty pounds on her once lean frame.
Although she laughingly claimed, “I have just plain grown,” the
weight gain was the vexing consequence of a serious hip injury, her
lifelong aversion to exercise, and the side-effects of the
tranquilizer and antipsychotic medication Thorazine, which she took
for many years.

Whereas she managed to finesse her way through many public
events, Sexton had less success concealing her anxiety in the
classroom. To students, she seemed more like a fragile and
overmedicated creature than the powerful poet they had expected. At
Wayland High School, Massachusetts, where Sexton co-taught her
first formal class in 1967, several students described Sexton as
“the little lady that writes poems.” In 1972, a student of Sexton’s
at Colgate College wrote of her first impression, “I thought MY
GOD! this person, this poor girl, she’s as scared as I would be.”
The descriptions of Sexton as that “little lady” and “poor girl”
had nothing to do with her height; after all, Sexton was 5’8”. Her
fear of interacting with her students showed, but she persevered
and in time found ways to manage this anxiety. Once she did, she
became an excellent, if unconventional, teacher. Teaching, like
writing, was a kind of magic to Sexton, and she believed that there
was no magic without courage.

Sexton often cited her alignment with Franz Kafka’s description
of literature as “the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Poetry had
certainly shattered the ice in her. She began her adult life as a
suicidal mother who believed that her only abilities...

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